Issue with Sony Laptop

Lostinspace

Hi, i purchased a Sony Vaio laptop in Harvey Normans about 2 months ago. There is a 5 year warranty with it. Recently i've been having a problem with it. Sometimes it powers off and restarts itself. This has happened on three occassions in the last two weeks. I've actually lost some college work i was doing because of it as the auto-recover did not work once the laptop restarted. I've googled the problem and i'm fairly sure it's called a 'blue screen error'. Now i've decided i'm going to bring it back to the shop and ask them to sort out the issue. Should i uninstall any programs that i have downloaded onto the laptop before i bring it back? I've downloaded things like Google Chrome and other programs such as this. If i bring it back to the shop i'm thinking they might tell me where to go as they could say that these programs are causing the problem. Has anyone been in a similar situation to this? Any advice appreciated. Thanks

Slippin Jimmy

Lostinspace wrote: »

Hi, i purchased a Sony Vaio laptop in Harvey Normans about 2 months ago. There is a 5 year warranty with it. Recently i've been having a problem with it. Sometimes it powers off and restarts itself. This has happened on three occassions in the last two weeks. I've actually lost some college work i was doing because of it as the auto-recover did not work once the laptop restarted. I've googled the problem and i'm fairly sure it's called a 'blue screen error'. Now i've decided i'm going to bring it back to the shop and ask them to sort out the issue. Should i uninstall any programs that i have downloaded onto the laptop before i bring it back? I've downloaded things like Google Chrome and other programs such as this. If i bring it back to the shop i'm thinking they might tell me where to go as they could say that these programs are causing the problem. Has anyone been in a similar situation to this? Any advice appreciated. Thanks

There is no need to uninstall anything from your laptop. Blue Screen happens to a lot of laptops for various reasons. You have a 5 year manufacturer warrenty with it, but im not sure if this will cover blue screen, if that's what it is.

Overheal

limited warrantys cover just about anything that isnt accidental damage.

Theres no need to uninstall stuff but as a precaution you should always backup a copy of your treasured documents.

aka_Ciaran

Could well be overheating, I've heard of laptops powering off if they get too hot. Make sure the fan isn't blocked with anything, or that you haven't it wedged up against something and the fan can't expel the air (I'm not a hardware expert though so this is just an educated guess).

Lostinspace

Thanks for the replies. It may well be that the fan is overheating as it does seem to generate a lot of warm air. I'll bring it back to them tomorrow and see what they say.

Paddyo

Overheal wrote: »

limited warrantys cover just about anything that isnt accidental damage.
QUOTE]

I understood that a manufacurers warranty will not cover software and that it is purely a hardware warranty.

Am I wrong?

Paddyo

Slippin Jimmy

Paddyo wrote: »

Overheal wrote: »

limited warrantys cover just about anything that isnt accidental damage.
QUOTE]

I understood that a manufacurers warranty will not cover software and that it is purely a hardware warranty.


Am I wrong?

Paddyo

Your correct in saying this. It will only cover you against hardware and nothing else.

Overheal

Well, in effect the warranty does cover any software your laptop came with, but only insofar that they can perform a factory reset on the laptop - restoring everything on the C:\ drive to its factory shipped condition. Generally speaking, they wont fiddle with other partitions. But no, the warranty does not protect your against viruses: that falls under the right to be stupid act :pac:

Slippin Jimmy

Overheal wrote: »

Well, in effect the warranty does cover any software your laptop came with, but only insofar that they can perform a factory reset on the laptop - restoring everything on the C:\ drive to its factory shipped condition. Generally speaking, they wont fiddle with other partitions. But no, the warranty does not protect your against viruses: that falls under the right to be stupid act :pac:

Sure we can remove viruses for free

Fysh

Before you can go getting this dealt with under warranty you'd need to prove it wasn't a software issue, which means doing the following:

1. Back up ALL your important files/data to CD/DVD/pendrive/external hard drive
2. Check your important files are accessible from another machine
3. Investigate possible causes of the problem: firstly, open the Event Viewer (right click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop, select "Manage", open the Event Viewer from the System Tools list and click on System) and look for any error entries around the times when the problem comes up. The causes may not be immediately obvious, so you may have to search Google for any error messages you find.
4. If that doesn't give any clues, go to Control Panel > System and select the Advanced tab. In the Startup & Recovery section, click "settings" and uncheck the Automatically Restart option. The next time the problem occurs, make a note of the full details of the error and search Google for any information.
5. If you still can't find any useful hints as to what the issue may be, check that Windows is up to date with patches and security fixes by running Windows Update. You can check other Microsoft software at the same time by using the Microsoft Update option available in Windows Update. Also check the Sony website to see if there are any new drivers for your laptop's hardware as these may resolve software issues.
6. You should also consider doing system scans for viruses and other malware if you can't identify a particular cause for the problem; Spybot Search & Destroy, AVG 8.0 Free Edition, and Avast! amongst others may help you identify any problems on your laptop.

The Windows instructions here are written with XP in mind, though I'm pretty sure equivalent options are available in Vista.